Extraits

“You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we’re caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”

“And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She's a verb.”

“The trouble with atheism," Temoc said, "is that it offers a limited range of curses.”

“Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.”

“Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between flash and rumble felt in the body's core, was primitive man's first experiences of time -- the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods.”

“We all think we’re on our own side, until the time comes to declare war.”

“You live in a grim universe.”

“That’s risk management for you.”

“He sighed. “There is one thing you must understand about destroying gods, boy.” “Only one?” “You must be ready to take their place.”

“We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles.”

“I’m on a quest, I think,” he said, not having realised this before. “Or something like one.”

“Those went out of fashion a long time ago.”